Part of your Twitter success is knowing how to listen. In other words, the art of monitoring Twitter activity related to your brand and its reputation, your industry and your target audience.

I’m sure that there have been moments when you’re wondering just how people are so fast at replying to comments on Twitter, spotting engagement opportunities and emerging trends? Well, that’s because they use the right tools for it.

One of our favorite ones is TweetDeck a platform powered by Twitter, that helps you manage your Twitter account(s) in a more effective way, while giving an overview of all Twitter activity.

How to get started

TweetDeck is free (yey!) and you can start using it by logging in with your Twitter account. If you’re managing more than one Twitter accounts you can add them via the Settings widget at the bottom left side of your dashboard.

How to set up your monitoring dashboard

At first, you’ll see 4 default columns on your dashboard. Yet TweetDeck has endless possibilities when it comes to monitoring so you can customize it according to your needs by simply clicking on the add column option on the left.

For every day use, what I find useful and time saving is having a couple of Twitter lists on separate columns (for example influencers or content sources), a column for mentions and notifications that makes it easier to respond and another separate column for hashtag monitoring.

How to filter your results

The best part about customizing your dashboard is column filters. You can filter all the results presented in a column based on: